Rules · Ornament · Roofs · Façades
Mount from the walls to the drum in stepped tiers of decorative gables with pointed ogee heads, the kokoshniki, each tier set back and narrower than the one below, so that the body of the church rises into its domes in a pyramid of arches.
Kokoshniki (named after a traditional women’s headdress) began as the ends of real vaults, like zakomary, and became a purely decorative system. Stacked in tiers, often with carved and tiled frames, they dissolve the transition from cube to drum into a flickering cascade of curves.
They are the signature of seventeenth-century Moscow, as at the Trinity in Nikitniki, and they were used on tented churches to make the passage from square body to octagonal tent.
Lift the dome on a cylindrical or polygonal drum pierced with windows between the ring of the pendentives and the springing of the dome, to light the centre of the church and to make the dome visible from afar.
drum height ≈ ⅓–1 × its radius (Byzantine); much taller in Russian churches
Crown the four corner bays of a cross-in-square with smaller domes on drums around the great central dome, making a five-domed quincunx.
Lift each dome on a tall drum and give it a bulbous outer shell that swells beyond the drum and draws up to a point under the cross; build the shell as a light timber frame sheathed in metal over the structural vault below.
onion Ø ≈ 1.2–1.3 × drum Ø; height ≈ 2 × its base radius
Divide each wall into bays with pilaster strips and end each bay in a semicircular gable, the zakomara, that follows the curve of the barrel vault behind it; shape the roof to the gables.
usually 3 zakomary per façade, one per bay
Instead of a dome, crown the church with a tall octagonal pyramid of masonry (the shatyor, or tent) set on an octagon over the square body, with kokoshniki at the transitions and a small cupola at the top.
Ascension, Kolomenskoye (1532): ≈ 62 m high; cube → octagon → tent → cupola
Build the principal cathedral after an honoured prototype: study the old cathedral that is to be the model and keep its form (five domes, walls divided into bays each crowned with a rounded gable, three apses to the east) while building it with the best new craft.
Cite this page Chris Paton, “Tiers of kokoshniki”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/kokoshniki. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.